- Lansing, Alfred.
Endurance.
New York: Carroll & Graf [1959, 1986] 1999.
ISBN 978-0-7867-0621-1.
-
Novels and dramatisations of interplanetary missions, whether
(reasonably) scrupulously realistic,
highly speculative, or
utterly absurd, often focus on the
privation of their hardy crews and the psychological and
interpersonal stresses they must endure when venturing so
distant from the embrace of the planetary nanny state.
Balderdash! Unless a century of socialism succeeds in infantilising
its subjects into pathetic, dependent, perpetual adolescents
(see the last item cited above as an example), such voyages of
discovery will be crewed by explorers, that pinnacle
of the human species who volunteers to pay any price, bear any
burden, and accept any risk to be among the first to see what's
over the horizon.
This chronicle of
Ernest Shackleton's
Imperial
Trans-Antarctic Expedition will acquaint you with real explorers,
and leave you in awe of what those outliers on the bell curve of our species
can and will endure in circumstances which almost defy description on the
printed page.
At the very outbreak of World War I, Shackleton's ship, the
Endurance,
named after the motto of his family,
Fortitudine vincimus: “By endurance
we conquer”, sailed for Antarctica. The mission was breathtaking in its ambition: to land
a party in Vahsel Bay area of the Weddell Sea, which would cross the
entire continent of Antarctica, proceeding to the South Pole with the
resources landed from their ship, and then crossing to the Ross Sea with
the aid of caches of supplies emplaced by a second party landing at
McMurdo Sound. So difficult was the goal that Shackleton's expedition
was attempting to accomplish that it was not achieved until
1957–1958, when the
Commonwealth
Trans-Antarctic Expedition made the crossing with the aid of
motorised vehicles and aerial reconnaissance.
Shackleton's expedition didn't even manage to land on the Antarctic shore; the
Endurance was trapped in the pack ice of the Weddell Sea in
January 1915, and the crew were forced to endure the Antarctic winter on the
ship, frozen in place. Throughout the long polar night, conditions were tolerable
and morale was high, but much worse was to come. As the southern summer approached,
the pack ice began to melt, break up, and grind floe against floe, and on 27th October
1915, pressure of the ice against the ship became unsustainable and Shackleton
gave the order to abandon ship and establish a camp on the ice floe, floating on
the Weddell Sea. The original plan was to use the sled dogs and the men to
drag supplies and the ship's three lifeboats across the ice toward a cache of
supplies known to have been left at
Paulet Island
by an earlier expedition, but pressure ridges in the sea ice soon
made it evident that such an ambitious traverse would be impossible, and
the crew resigned themselves to camping on the ice pack, whose drift was
taking them north, until its breakup would allow them to use the boats
to make for the nearest land. And so they waited, until April 8th, 1916,
when the floe on which they were camped began to break up and they were
forced into the three lifeboats to head for
Elephant Island, a
forbidding and uninhabited speck of land in the Southern Ocean. After a
harrowing six day voyage, the three lifeboats arrived at the island,
and for the first time in 497 days the crew of the Endurance
were able to sleep on
terra firma.
Nobody, even sealers and whalers operating of Antarctica, ever visited
Elephant Island: Shackleton's crew were the first to land there. So
the only hope of rescue was for a party to set out from there to the
nearest reachable inhabited location,
South
Georgia Island, 1,300
kilometres across the
Drake Passage,
the stormiest and most treacherous
sea on Earth. (There were closer destinations, but due to the winds
and currents of the Southern Ocean, none of them were achievable
in a vessel with the limited capabilities of their lifeboat.) Well,
it had to be done, and so they did it. In one of the most
remarkable
achievements of seamanship of all time,
Frank Worsley
sailed his small open boat through these forbidding seas, surviving
hurricane-force winds, rogue waves, and unimaginable conditions at
the helm, arriving at almost a pinpoint landing on a tiny island in a
vast sea with only his sextant and a pocket chronometer, the last remaining
of the 24 the Endurance carried when it sailed from the Thames,
worn around his neck to keep it from freezing.
But even then it wasn't over. Shackleton's small party had landed on the other
side of South Georgia Island from the whaling station, and the state of their
boat and prevailing currents and winds made it impossible to sail around
the coast to there. So, there was no alternative but to go cross-country, across
terrain completely uncharted (all maps showed only the coast, as nobody had
ventured inland). And, with no other option, they did it. Since Shackleton's
party, there has been only one crossing of South Georgia Island, done in
1955 by a party of expert climbers with modern equipment and a complete aerial
survey of their route. They found it difficult to imagine how Shackleton's party,
in their condition and with their resources, managed to make the crossing, but
of course it was because they had to.
Then it was a matter of rescuing the party left at the original landing site
on South Georgia, and then mounting an expedition to relieve those waiting at
Elephant Island. The latter was difficult and frustrating—it was not
until 30th August 1916 that Shackleton was able to take those he left on
Elephant Island back to civilisation. And every single person who departed
from South Georgia on the Endurance survived the expedition
and returned to civilisation. All suffered from the voyage, but only stowaway
Perce Blackboro
lost a foot to frostbite; all the rest returned without consequences from
their ordeal.
Bottom line—there were men on this expedition, and if
similarly demanding expeditions in the future are crewed by men and
women equal to their mettle, they will come through just fine without
any of the problems the touchy-feely inkblot drones worry about. People
with the “born as victim” self-image instilled by the nanny
state are unlikely to qualify for such a mission, and should the all-smothering
state manage to reduce its subjects to such larvæ, it is unlikely
in the extreme that it would mount such a mission, choosing instead to
huddle in its green enclaves powered by sewage and the unpredictable
winds until the giant rock from the sky calls down the curtain on their
fruitless existence.
I read the
Kindle edition; unless you're concerned with
mass and volume taking this book on a long trip (for which it couldn't
be more appropriate!), I'd recommend the print edition, which is not only
less expensive (neglecting shipping charges), but also reproduces
with much higher quality
the many photographs taken by expedition photographer
Frank Hurley and
preserved through the entire ordeal.
August 2010 